In art and reflections on visual culture, projection occurs in all kinds of formats. Its many applications come from a development in which sometimes very different fields interact: physics, geometry, cartography, optics, psychology, the fine arts and show business. As a concept however, projection has not been thematized all that much; it links mathematical and cultural conceptualization, operations of the unconscious and of an active mind.
THE PROJECTION PROJECT durven denken, durven dromen [dare to think, dare to dream] is taking place in a media landscape where a new paradigm emerges. Today we experience a farewell to various analogue image technologies. As a result of the digital revolution many methods sanctified by the tradition of modern art, such as slide- and film projection, will get into disuse. The art worlds response to this is one of lucid nostalgia and militant identification; in contemporary art slide- and film projection will for sure remain important media for a while, but these can hardly be dissociated from the effect of looking back melancholy at an epoch and a technology that once was.

But the historical breakdown of projection as technology means that we have reached a point in time where projection does not longer need to be thought in narrow technical or technological terms. Relevant here is the socio-political undertone of projection as a collective event or as a project of a future community. Now that projection is losing its technological servitude, the concept can regain its metaphorical power. Our hypothesis therefore is that artists at this juncture once more tackle and regauge the artistic concept of projection.

What does current projection art tell us? THE PROJECTION PROJECT investigates how art offers alternatives to a culture of escapism typified by an immense presence of phantasmagorical representations, images carried by technology that are filtering/masking our daily reality. In current projection art we see, amongst others, an interest in technique as intoxicator by deconstructing technology in its operations on the human psyche. Here is a relation with psychedelic art from the 2nd half of the 60, with one difference: the understanding that todays reality itself often is already hallucinatory. Recent projection art also differs from the phantasmagories that dominate todays visual culture, in that it redefines the implicit ambition of the term: projection as a project, a visionary image, radiating an expectation about the future. Historical consciousness is repaired, after all projection as a pure utopia is a reaction to the present, a product of its time and rooted in a past.THE PROJECTION PROJECT wants to be a thoughtful enterprise in itself, a promising method to [re]think and show the potential of the act of projection. In its ambition, the project is a co-operation of three curators [Mark Kremer, Edwin Carels, Dieter Roelstraete] and three institutions [MuHKA, IFFR, NAi publishers]. This unison of visions and practices led to an exhibition, a publication, and a film programme.PUBLICATION [prologue] Authors
Edwin Carels, Mark Kremer, Dominique Païni, Dieter Roelstraete and Thomas Zummer,including a visual essay by Joost Rekveld.
isbn 90-5662-543-6EXHIBITION [MuHKA] Participating artists
Marie José Burki, Marc De Blieck, Rodney Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Kristina Ianatchkova & Vitto Valentinov, Timothée Ingen-Housz, Yeondoo Jung, André Kruysen,Bertrand Lavier, Bruce Nauman, Stephen & Timothy Quay, Joost Rekveld, Matthew Stokes, Fiona Tan, Krassimir Terziev, Ana Torfs, Paul Van Hoeydonck, Benjamin Verdonck, Cerith Wyn Evans and Thomas Zummer Curators
Mark Kremer, Edwin Carels, Dieter RoelstraeteFILM AS PROJECTION
The cinematographic part of THE PROJECTION PROJECT, with presentations in MuHKA_media, comprises three retrospectives with work by David Lynch, Werner Herzog and Abbas Kiarostami respectively, three evenings in which the curators give their personal view of the possibilities of film as projection medium

As an epilogue, MuHKA also presents REAR WINDOWS, comprising works by Anri Sala, Julie Morel and Michael Snow.

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